Series | Alterum Byzantium
Review | Byzantium and Its Neighbours
Chapter | À qui s’adressait vraiment la polémique antijudaïque à Byzance ?
À qui s’adressait vraiment la polémique antijudaïque à Byzance ?
Abstract
The identification of the ‘real’ audience for any given anti-Jewish treatise often remains elusive due to a perplexing blend of lengthy, ahistorical theological sections and much briefer allusions to the time of the writing. It seems more expedient to determine for each text what it is not rather than to speculate about what it ‘might be’, and to admit that long segments of some texts are actually ‘dead pages’, included for the sake of genre conventions or out of adherence to authoritative precedents, but of little significance even to the author. In some cases, these passages are a camouflage for the insertion of seemingly more relevant topics at the margins of the text. From the eleventh century onwards, anti-Jewish sections of general theological encyclopaedias and even of dedicated works have more of a protocol function: authors cannot dispense with the time-honoured practice of anti-Jewish polemics, albeit with little genuine urgency. From the fourteenth century onwards, however, a new wave of anti-Jewish writings appears more as a by-product of the increasingly intense polemics against Islam: the two genres mirrored each other, and anti-Jewish discourse was strategically instrumentalized for anti-Muslim arguments.
Submitted: June 19, 2024 | Accepted: Aug. 27, 2024 | Published Forthcoming | Language: fr
Keywords Anti-Jewish • Byzantine • Islam • Audience • Polemic
Copyright © 2024 Vincent Déroche. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-837-8/003
